Every competitive analysis guide tells you to "analyze your competitors." Few give you a concrete template you can fill in today and present to your team tomorrow. This one does.
We've distilled hundreds of competitive analyses into a single, repeatable framework. It covers the seven dimensions that actually matter for strategic decision-making — and skips the academic filler that nobody reads. Whether you're a product marketer preparing a board deck, a founder sizing up the market, or a strategy lead running a quarterly review, this template works.
Let's build it section by section.
Before You Start: Scope Your Analysis
The most common competitive analysis mistake is trying to analyze everything about everyone. Before you open a single competitor's website, answer three questions:
- Who is this analysis for? The board? Product team? Sales? The audience determines the depth and focus. A board-level analysis needs market positioning and strategic threats. A sales team needs feature comparisons and objection handling. A product team needs technical capabilities and roadmap signals.
- Which competitors? Limit your analysis to 3-5 competitors max. Use your closed-lost data: which companies appeared most often in deals you lost? Those are your Tier 1 competitors. If you don't have CRM data, ask your sales team — they know.
- What decisions will this inform? "We need to decide whether to launch a free tier" is a focused analysis. "We need to understand the competitive landscape" is a research project that never ends. Be specific about the decision.
💡 Quick-Start Tip
If you've never done a competitive analysis before, start with just one competitor and work through the full template. It's better to go deep on one than shallow on five. You can always add more competitors once you've proven the format works for your team.
The Template: 7 Sections
Here's the complete framework. For each competitor, fill in all seven sections. We've included example entries to show what good looks like.
Section 1: Company Overview
The basics. Keep this brief — it's context, not the analysis.
- Company name & URL
- Founded / HQ / Employee count (LinkedIn is your friend)
- Funding status: Total raised, last round, investors (Crunchbase)
- Revenue estimate: If public, use filings. If private, estimate from employee count (SaaS rule of thumb: $150K–$250K revenue per employee)
- Target market: Who are they selling to? SMB, mid-market, enterprise? Which industries?
- One-line positioning: Copy their homepage headline. This is how they want to be perceived.
Example: "Acme CI — Founded 2021, SF, ~80 employees. Series B ($35M from Sequoia). Est. $12-20M ARR. Targets mid-market SaaS companies. Positions as 'AI-powered competitive intelligence for product teams.'"
Section 2: Product & Features
What do they actually offer? Focus on capabilities that overlap with or differentiate from your product.
- Core product: What is the main thing it does?
- Key features: List the 5-8 features they promote most prominently
- Unique capabilities: What can they do that you can't (yet)?
- Gaps: What can you do that they can't?
- Platform/integrations: What ecosystem do they plug into?
- Recent launches: What have they shipped in the last 6 months?
Pro tip: Don't just read their features page. Sign up for a free trial. Use the product. Read their changelog. Check G2 and Capterra reviews for what real users say the product actually does well and poorly.
Section 3: Pricing & Packaging
How they charge reveals their strategy. This section often delivers the most immediately actionable insights.
- Pricing model: Per seat? Per usage? Flat fee? Freemium?
- Plan structure: List every tier with price and key differentiators
- Free tier / trial: What do they give away? For how long?
- Enterprise pricing: Custom? Published? Rough range?
- Add-ons / upsells: What costs extra beyond the base plan?
- Recent pricing changes: Have they raised, lowered, or restructured pricing recently?
| Competitor | Entry Price | Mid Tier | Enterprise | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your Company | $49/mo | $149/mo | Custom | Per seat |
| Competitor A | $0 (free tier) | $99/mo | $499/mo | Per seat |
| Competitor B | $29/mo | $199/mo | Custom | Usage-based |
| Competitor C | $99/mo flat | $299/mo flat | Custom | Flat fee |
Analysis prompt: Where do you sit on price? Are you the premium option, the value option, or somewhere in between? Is your pricing model aligned with how customers want to buy?
Section 4: Go-to-Market & Positioning
How they sell and position themselves reveals where they see opportunity — and where you might be vulnerable.
- Homepage headline: Copy it verbatim
- Primary value proposition: What's the #1 benefit they promise?
- Target persona: Who is their ideal customer? (Check their case studies and testimonials)
- Sales model: Self-serve? Sales-led? PLG? Hybrid?
- Content strategy: What do they blog about? How often? Are they investing in SEO?
- Social presence: Where are they active? What's their tone?
- Key proof points: Customer logos, metrics they cite, awards they display
Analysis prompt: If a prospect read your homepage and their homepage back-to-back, what would the differences be? Could you swap the logos and the messaging would still fit? If so, you have a positioning problem.
Section 5: Strengths & Weaknesses
Be brutally honest — especially about their strengths. An analysis that only highlights competitor weaknesses is useless because your sales team will get blindsided.
- Top 3 strengths: What do they genuinely do well? What would make a prospect choose them over you?
- Top 3 weaknesses: Where do they fall short? What do their own customers complain about?
- Review analysis: Read their G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius reviews. What themes emerge in positive and negative reviews?
"The most valuable part of any competitive analysis isn't the strengths you find — it's having the honesty to acknowledge where competitors beat you, and using that to improve."
Section 6: Hiring & Investment Signals
Job postings are the most underrated competitive intelligence source. They tell you where a company is investing 6-12 months before the results show up in product launches or market moves.
- Total open roles: How many jobs are posted? Is headcount growing or flat?
- Key hiring areas: Are they hiring engineers (building), salespeople (scaling), or marketers (growing awareness)?
- Notable roles: Any roles that signal strategic shifts? (e.g., "Head of Enterprise Sales" = upmarket move, "AI/ML Engineer" = AI product investment, "VP EMEA" = geographic expansion)
- Leadership changes: Has the executive team changed recently?
Where to look: Their careers page, LinkedIn Jobs, Glassdoor, and job aggregators like Indeed.
Section 7: Strategic Assessment
This is where you synthesize everything into actionable insight. Without this section, you have a data collection exercise, not an analysis.
- Strategic direction: Based on everything above, where is this competitor heading? What's their 12-month bet?
- Threat level: High / Medium / Low — and why. High means they're actively taking your deals or will be within 6 months.
- Key battleground: Where will you most directly compete? (Price? Features? Market segment? Channel?)
- Recommended response: What should your company do in response to this competitor's strategy? Be specific: "Ship X feature by Q3," "Create a comparison landing page targeting their customers," "Adjust pricing on the mid tier."
Putting It All Together: The One-Page Summary
After filling in the full template for each competitor, create a one-page executive summary that captures the key insights. This is what you'll present to leadership and share broadly.
📋 Executive Summary Template
Competitive Landscape Overview (2-3 sentences on the overall market dynamics)
Competitor A: One paragraph — positioning, key threat, recommended response
Competitor B: One paragraph — positioning, key threat, recommended response
Competitor C: One paragraph — positioning, key threat, recommended response
Top 3 Strategic Priorities: Based on this analysis, what are the three most important things your company should do?
How Often to Update Your Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis is not a one-time deliverable. Markets move. Here's the cadence that works for most teams:
- Full analysis: Annually or when a major market event occurs (new competitor enters, acquisition, funding round)
- Pricing & product check: Monthly — these change most frequently and have the most direct impact on your business
- Hiring signals: Quarterly — hiring patterns shift slowly but reveal long-term strategy
- Quick competitive scan: Weekly — a 15-minute review of news, social, and any alerts from your CI tools
Or, skip the manual cadence entirely and use a tool like RivalSift to automate the monitoring layer. You'll get weekly reports covering pricing, product, content, hiring, and social changes across all your competitors — leaving you to focus on the strategic analysis that matters.
Three Mistakes That Ruin Competitive Analyses
1. Feature Checklist Syndrome
Creating a giant grid of features with checkmarks does not constitute analysis. Yes, comparison tables are useful for sales enablement. But a strategic competitive analysis should tell you why competitors made certain choices, what it means for the market, and how you should respond — not just list what everyone has.
2. Ignoring Your Own Weaknesses
The analysis should include an honest assessment of where you lose. If you can't articulate why a reasonable prospect would choose your competitor over you, your analysis is incomplete. Talk to churned customers, read your own negative reviews, and debrief lost deals.
3. Analysis Without Action
Every competitive analysis should end with "now what." If the document doesn't include specific recommended actions with owners and timelines, it will be read once and forgotten. The strategic assessment section is the most important part of the template — don't skip it.
Key Takeaways
- Scope before you start. Know your audience, pick 3-5 competitors, and define the decision this analysis will inform.
- Cover all seven dimensions: Overview, product, pricing, GTM, strengths/weaknesses, hiring signals, and strategic assessment.
- Be honest about competitor strengths. Your team needs the truth to compete effectively.
- End with actions. Every analysis should produce specific, ownable next steps.
- Update regularly. A competitive analysis from last quarter is a historical document. Automate monitoring to keep your analysis current.
Want to see what a real competitive analysis looks like? Check out our sample reports for HubSpot, Linear, and Shopify — each is a weekly competitive intelligence brief built using the framework in this guide.
Automate Your Competitive Analysis
RivalSift monitors your competitors across pricing, product, hiring, content, and social — and delivers a structured competitive analysis to your inbox every week.
Get Your Free Report →